30 movies you need to see before you die

This might be the ultimate movie list. It’s a primer for people who may want help in their quest to become more well-rounded film aficionados – or an argument-starter for those like myself who spend a lot of time in the dark staring at a big screen.

Either way, it’s highly subjective, a quasi-professorial exercise in assertive opinion. It’s not a list of the greatest films ever made, or even my personal favorites, although it inevitably includes some of them, being filtered through my experience as a movie lover looking backward and forward from my place in the “Star Wars” generation. It’s intended to cover many cinematic bases, and is broken down by category, loose genres that may seem like hair-splitting or broad classification, but seem right and appropriate.

There’s a chance you’ve seen some or a lot of these. (That’s why I’ve included a few additional films in each category, for further exploration.) But all of them are worth seeing again – and some of them again and again and again.

'Citizen Kane': the ultimate film

This category is full of classics among classics, films that excel in every technical (direction, editing, cinematography) and thematic (writing, acting, tone) way. Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece developed such a groundbreaking visual vocabulary and narrative structure for the medium, its influence is still prevalent today. And “Rosebud” is the greatest reveal in cinema history.

This is (almost) all you need to know about Hitchcock’s influential shocker: 78 shots, 52 cuts, the blood circling down the drain. The shower scene is a filmmaking master class on its own, an exquisite balance of proficient technique and gut-wrenching horror. Every film that has tried to terrify us post-“Psycho” has aspired to this level of skill.

When this 1939 treasure shifted from the black-and-white of drab old Kansas to a vibrant Technicolor Oz, it showed the world the transporting power of the moving picture. Its every element invokes wonder – the sets, the characters, the performances and, of course, the songs, every one of them a joyous earworm. Roger Ebert best described Dorothy’s great journey from home to a fantasy land and back again: “(W)e still watch it … decades later because its underlying story penetrates straight to the deepest insecurities of childhood, stirs them and then reassures them.” When even the gloried status of “Citizen Kane” is debated, we can all agree that “The Wizard of Oz” is a masterpiece.

See also: “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), “Moulin Rouge!,” “The Sound of Music,” “My Fair Lady”

'The Big Lebowski': the ultimate comedy

Comedy is horribly subjective, but I’d wager most everyone who’s experienced the jumbo mishaps of The Dude has laughed the oxygen right out of the room. In that character, the Coen Bros. concocted a zen loser for the ages, portrayed by a never-more-inspired Jeff Bridges as a sloppy passivist (that’s not a typo) living by a disarmingly elegant philosophy: The Dude abides. It sort of helps him navigate a way-bonkers plot of mistaken identity, kidnapping and bowling. Lots of bowling.

The Dude is an oaf (albeit sometimes a wise one), yet is the sanest person in the film; most representative of the mad, mad, mad, mad world around him are John Goodman’s bodacious, bellicose mess Walter Sobchak and Julianne Moore’s wildly pretentious artist Maude Lebowski. His hallucinogenic “Gutterballs” fantasy – set to Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s “Just Dropped In” – is probably the looniest thing ever put to celluloid. And those who criticize the film for its proliferation of expletives aren’t, like, seeing the forest for the effs, man.